Today
Dr. Keating is a family physician at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist in Winston-Salem, and she also serves the Associate Program Director at the Wake Forest University (WFU) School of Medicine Family Medicine Residency. In addition, Dr. Keating led the WFU Family Medicine Interest Group (FMIG) as its faculty advisor from 2017 until this year.
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Dr. Keating never intended to practice Family Medicine here in the Old North State. After completing her medical degree at Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Virginia, Dr. Keating and her husband expected to return there after residency. “We bought a house when we moved here with every intention of flipping it in three years,” she says. “13 years later, we’re still here in that same house.”
Dr. Keating stayed because she found the educational environment she needed at the WFU Family Medicine Residency. “I really wanted a residency where I was going to work with amazing people and be challenged to reach my fullest potential,” she says. “I found that here at Wake Forest. It was everything I imagined and more! It was such a great fit for me, since the department under [past NCAFP president] Dr. Rich Lord fostered my personal and professional development. I was never asked to fit a mold.”
This environment gave Dr. Keating the latitude to blaze a trail into an all-new academic Family Medicine Fellowship, she says. But first, she had to realize that she was not suited for the sports medicine fellowship she had expected to complete: “After a 14-hour shift in the MICU, I had to go cover a high school football game from the sidelines,” Dr. Keating says. “It was 36 degrees and raining, and I thought, I don’t actually love this.” What she loved was teaching Family Medicine.
But she and another residency colleague at WFU needed to blaze a new path for better ways of doing that. Together, they proposed a new fellowship to Dr. Lord (who served then as now as the Department Chair) that combined a master’s degree in medical education from Johns Hopkins University, teaching courses on doctor-patient relations and clinical skills in the medical school, teaching in the Family Medicine clerkship, providing outpatient care, resident precepting, and inpatient coverage in the WFU Family Medicine service. Dr. Lord agreed, and they were on their way.
“That provided the space, time, and experiences that helped me develop into the educator I am today,” Dr. Keating says. “I’m so grateful for the culture and community that Dr. Lord created here, since it fosters each person’s individual development.”
“I love my colleagues,” she says. “They are the greatest people I could imagine working with, and I’m so blessed to call them my colleagues and friends.”
Her admiration extends to the WFU residents she has taught and worked with. “The residents I've gotten to teach over the years are some of the most amazing human beings that I’ve ever met,” Dr. Keating says. “I’m so happy they’re serving their communities like they are.”
What Dr. Keating shares with these colleagues and residents is one shared mission: better Family Medicine on behalf of patients and future family physicians. “When you are in a residency environment, you are passionate about teaching Family Medicine,” she says. “When you’re passionate about teaching, that unites people around that shared common goal.” But even when they share so much, Dr. Keating says that the WFU residency still fosters plenty of individual support that can be different for every resident and faculty member: “We don’t create the same type of resident over and over. We’re not all OB, all sports medicine, or all hospitalists. We truly try to foster every individual’s personal and professional development.”
While first attending NCAFP’s Family Medicine Day event as a second-year resident, Dr. Keating saw that the Academy was fostering medical students like WFU was fostering her. “That event was so cool, because it wasn’t just a residency recruitment event,” Dr. Keating says. “It was truly trying to develop the students there.”
But when Dr. Keating became the WFU Family Medicine Residency Associate Program Director in 2022, the support she needed from the NCAFP changed. She attended her first program director meeting at the NCAFP Winter Meeting and learned that the support there was just as good for program directors as it was for medical students. “I love all the things that the NCAFP does to promote education and also the work the Academy does to connect physicians at both the educational and clinical levels,” she says.
Dr. Keating includes the connection opportunities that the NCAFP and the NCAFP Foundation give to the medical students in the Family Medicine interest group (FMIG) at WFU School of Medicine. She became the FMIG’s faculty advisor in 2017 and appreciates what the NCAFP provides to the group’s students. “[NCAFP Workforce Initiatives Manager] Perry Price has been an amazing student advocate by always getting resources, educational opportunities, and shadowing opportunities for the students,” Dr. Keating says. “Those include the summer programs and sponsoring them to attend the Winter Meeting and the AAFP FUTURE conference, and they’re nothing short of incredible.” Dr. Keating handed off her faculty advisor role to Dr. Karen Wolf earlier this year and looks forward to the group’s continued work.
